Pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao failed to knock Shane Mosley out in their match this morning at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, but they damn near put everyone who watched the match to sleep. After getting rocked by Pacquiao in the 3rd round, Mosley spent most of the rest of the match refusing to engage in combat, leading the crowd of 16,000 to serenade him with boos.

Continue reading "Manny Pacquiao dominates Shane Mosley in a disappointing snoozefest in Las Vegas"

Fire Quinito rounds up all the links you need to read for tomorrow's big match between Manny Pacquiao and Shane Mosley, so you can concentrate on your Mother's Day shopping.



Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports: “There was a time not that long ago that those in Manny Pacquiao’s camp had legitimate reason to be worried before his major fights. He didn’t have a right hand to speak of and he only fought moving in one direction. He was so aggressive on offense that he was deficient defensively. There wasn’t a lot of nuance to his game. One by one, Pacquiao has erased those flaws and turned himself into the best fighting machine the sport has seen since ‘Sugar’ Ray Leonard more than a quarter of a century ago.”

Continue reading "Boxing mop-up: Pacquiao vs Mosley"

There’s a war raging on televised boxing in the United States, and just as it happened a few years ago in the Philippines, it involves Manny Pacquiao. Over the weekend, various sources reported that the pound-for-pound champion’s May 7 fight against Shane Mosley will be carried by Showtime. It’s a major coup for the premium TV network in its battle with rival HBO, which has dominated the American televised boxing landscape for decades.

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Quinito Henson had an interesting series of articles last week about Manny Pacquiao’s claim as the greatest fighter ever, and by “interesting,” I mean “incredibly stupid,” even by Quinito’s usual standards. He prefaced the two-part column by saying that he would compare the achievements of four of the greatest boxers of all-time against those of Manny Pacquiao, and promised at the end of the first installment that he would try to make a “logical conclusion” as to which boxer deserves to be called the greatest.

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Fire Quinito rounds up all the essential links from the Manny Pacquiao-Joshua Clottey snoozefest so you could have more time to read the latest on Katrina Halili’s case against Hayden Kho.

Continue reading "Boxing mop-up: Manny Pacquiao goes FPJ on Joshua Clottey"

So the big news over the weekend involved pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao moving on from all the drama of his aborted mega-fight with Floyd Mayweather. After Pacquiao rejected a proposed bout against junior middleweight champion Yuri Foreman, his promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank announced that the boxer will instead face tough welterweight contender Joshua Clottey.

Clottey last outing was a razor-thin split decision against Miguel Cotto, a bout Clottey dominated in the latter rounds. The Ghanaian is renowned for his toughness, having never been knocked down in his career never been seriously hurt in his career (he was actually knocked down in the Cotto fight), and would certainly present a unique challenge for Pacquiao.

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Going back to my running theme of how awesome it would be if great Filipino writers started writing more about sports, GMANews.tv editor-in-chief Howie Severino (a friend of this blog, incidentally) penned a thought-provoking piece about violence in boxing, in the context of Manny Pacquiao’s bloody victory over Miguel Cotto, and Z Gorres’ brain injury. Howie points out that while adulation for Pacquiao in the country after his win is universal, there still remains rightful ambivalence about the brutal nature of the sport.

While I mostly agree with most of the points that Howie raised, I would offer the following addenda: first, Cotto is known to be a bleeder, so his bloodied face might have looked worse than it really was; and second, Cotto is a world-class fighter who knows how to protect himself in the ring, and if he is unable to do so, then his corner should do it for him. Cotto’s corner, unfortunately, did not do enough on the second point, leaving their fighter in a terribly precarious situation in the latter rounds against Pacquiao. Cotto’s father already wanted the fight to stop, but the welterweight champion wanted to keep going.

Continue reading "Pacquiao, Cotto, and the savage nature of boxing"

Miguel Cotto knew that when he signed on to fight Manny Pacquiao, he was getting into what was essentially the boxing equivalent of a brutal knife fight. Cotto made sure to bring his knife when he walked into the ring.

The only problem was, Pacquiao decided to bring a chainsaw instead.

Read the rest of my post-fight column at Yahoo's Ringside with Manny

Fire Quinito rounds up all the best links for Manny Pacquiao’s sensational victory over Miguel Cotto, so you’ll have more time for bidding in Angel Locsin and Anne Curtis’ online auction.

Tim Starks, The Queensberry Rules: “There should be no controversy about this, and no question: Manny Pacquiao fought the best version of Miguel Cotto Saturday night, as Cotto showed by fighting on equal terms with Pacquiao for five rounds, even with a pair of knockdowns. But Pacquiao, as I expected, was the truly transcendent fighter to Cotto’s ultra-elite, and that, in the end was the difference. Pacquiao delivered a frightening beating on Cotto from the 6th round on, before the referee belatedly stepped in Pacquiao’s way in the 12th to save Cotto from nastier punishment.”

Continue reading "Boxing mop-up: Manny Pacquiao destroys Miguel Cotto"